gehringer_2

that might be interesting. Say you cut him and no-one picked him up. He's off the 40, you are still paying him. If you still haven't got insurance behind Sweeney, could you turn around and give him an invite to ST? Doesn't seem right but off the top of my head I can't see exactly why.

and indeed they do. 55/50

But Dearborn is going to throw MI to Trump...

he certainly will be if he pitches successfully again.

I think I get what BRef does with SRS, which appears to be a rolling average purely based on a team's last 100 game outcomes. If fangraphs is using a zips based system does that mean they are rebuilding each team's performance from their individual player projections? EDIT: one possible source of error in the rolling 100 game model is the step discontinuity in team composition at the deadline.

It's something that gives you a sanity check for what you are thinking in your fan brain. and this. In the end, everyone gets in or not after 162, but there is something special about watching the odds improve after your team is left for dead for good reason.

BRef certainly like the Tigers more - looks like once they process today's game they may rate Tigers ahead of Minny.

I'm not very confident the starting pitching holds up. The downside risks include Montero missing a decreasing number of bats, and Mize's unreliability. I was almost more optimistic about BP days than Casey's starts. OTOH, Olson could get back on track and lock down a couple games.

have you ever tried to blow up a dead lithium battery?

If a team was in every way a static entity, then you would just look at the season win-loss record and who was left to play (and their records) and the probability you'd get would be the best available predictor. I assume FG and ESPN do something like that. But we know a team is not a static entity. The personnel is always in flux, and the players themselves go through arcs of injury and health, some of which never even become public. Some young players are in a real process of getting better over the course of a year, maybe an older one irreversibly starts to break down. So the art of handicapping in large part turns on how far back do you want to go to get the 'best' estimate of a team's likely winning rate over the next X games. The further back you go, the stronger the statistical 'power' in the estimate, but the more your assumption that you are looking at the 'same' team all across the sample may be breaking down. If you take the whole season, since their records are exactly equal the best estimate would be the Twins and Tigers will win the same number of games of the next 9 so Minny end up winning by the tie-breaker (ignoring the difference in the quality of the opposition just for the sake of outlining the argument). If you look from the ASB, the Tigers would be slightly favored. If you look at the last 30, the Tigers would be clearly favored. Pay your money and take your choice! (if you like to gamble that is.......) 🤷‍♀️

Russians are finding out something that has always frustrated the West, which is that India is no-one's ally, it's foreign policy actions are about as transactional as it gets.

ESPN has them at 42%. TBH, if I were a bettor, I would rate the odds of the Tigers winning one more game of the last 9 than the Twins as better than 50% based on their current lineups.

85 might do it. More likely 86 though. 6 of 9 requires them to stay on the their current high for another 10 days. I think they can drop one game each series and still have a decent chance.

I like that the Orioles have pretty much lost any chance of catching the Yankees for 1st place. That's the kind of thing that can take the wind out of a team's sails.

well, I suppose that since the Tsar already had his own terrorist secret police, it was/is sort of endemic in Russian history!

OK grant in a way but I'll defend a more specific syntax. As leaders, Hilter and Stalin were using terror as a lever of state power, which by definition I'll grant is a form of terrorism, but in conventional parlance I think most people would take 'terrorism' to mean the program of non-state actors and that is certainly what I meant to refer to. Terror by established government terror is more conventional tyranny? Now before they came to power? There was Krystallnacht and few other events IIRC, but TBF Hilter rose to power primarily by the conventional political process and the Bolsheviks fought an actual armed revolution so terror maybe a piece there also but to a larger 'conventional' movement.

Harris is building his team out of his pieces. I don't see him trading any core present or future player. I could see Sweeney being moved but none of the others (if they regard him as purely stop gap)

He's completely the wrong profile, but I would love to see Torkelson go play winter ball. Just work on technique in a zero pressure environment.

there just isn't any bottom

3BB in 5PA is a 600 OBP for the night. He just improved his OPS on the night. EDIIT: I see this has already been noted.....) We were talking earlier in the day about guys brought up too soon - I'd say Spencer is a worse example than any of the pitchers. He never established good contact skill before he was brought up and when he put some balls in the seats last season nobody cared, but his weaknesses as a hitter were still there. 267 BA since he's come back up is his best stretch of contact since his one decent month (May) last season.

I like 9ths without drama

3BB and 2K. Weird night for Tork

Miller's problem is that he giving up an EV out of proportion to his other stats led with a 4% HR rate. He's not hit so much, but he's been hit hard.

only 24, doesn't K too much, walks some. Definitely possible upside yet.

And Johnson just lost his vote to continue government funding with the voting poison pill attached with something like 14 GOP members defecting. Odds of Jeffries being Speaker by election time just ratcheted up.